


Filling In a Gap

by ncfan



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Falconry, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Pre-Canon, Siblings, Sister-Sister Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-12-25 13:50:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18262586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: “Now, Elise—“ Camilla knelt down before her to adjust the slightly crooked brooch holding her cloak shut. While she was at it, she checked to make certain that Elise was wearing the thick leather gloves Camilla had presented to her earlier, and that she actually had her arms through the armholes in her violet cloak. “Remember what I told you about how you need to behave in the mews.”Elise puffed out her cheeks. “Aww, seriously? I just wanna pet the birds.”Camilla smiled fondly down at her. “Aren’t you cute?” When Elise huffed and puffed out her cheeks a little more, turning her cheeks a pinkish-red, Camilla patted her head. “Oh, sweetie, I understand. And if you like, I’ll take you to the dovecote, too; I’m sure the pigeons will love to see you. But the falcons are different. They might hurt you if you’re too rough with them, even with their jesses and their hoods on. You have to be more mindful.”Falconry was, after all, the sport of kings. It only made sense that at least some of the king's children would take part.





	Filling In a Gap

**Author's Note:**

> You can definitely make arguments for Leo and Elise being too young in this fic to have taken up falconry, but eh, different times, and it’s hardly the most age-inappropriate thing they’ve ever done.

Camilla did not have much from her mother. Much of the belongings Lady Cecilia had brought with her to court had vanished after she had been found dead, and her two surviving daughters had been drowning in suspicions and something that might, in some other world, have convincingly passed for grief. Camilla and Beatrix had managed to track down some of her jewelry to a fence in the Labyrinth, but they had never been able to track down the rest of it, and Beatrix had… It wasn’t long before Camilla was left to try to find them on her own, and was left to come to the conclusion that she couldn’t accomplish such a thing unaided.

What Camilla had primarily received from her mother was a reputation whose shadow she was still struggling to escape, even years after the woman’s death. Though their interests and their manner both were different, though they dealt with their enemies in different ways (poison was fine for a plot, but _nothing_ beat the visceral satisfaction of sinking an axe into an enemy’s flesh), that shadow was still long and dark enough to blot out the weak sun of Nohr. She knew she wasn’t the only one of her surviving siblings who was struggling with this—though, for Leo, it certainly didn’t help that he was growing to be the very spit of Lady Sybille. His strategy, given the fact that he had recently picked up magic, seemed to be to obliterate her memory and set himself up in her place. To each, their own.

Most of what Camilla had from her mother was a cancered reputation and the poisoned tatters of her love. That the deaths of her mother and older maternal sister had left her mistress of a manor house just outside of Windmire rarely entered into her considerations. It did sometimes, though.

“Now, Elise—“ Camilla knelt down before her to adjust the slightly crooked brooch holding her cloak shut. While she was at it, she checked to make certain that Elise was wearing the thick leather gloves Camilla had presented to her earlier, and that she actually had her arms through the armholes in her violet cloak. “Remember what I told you about how you need to behave in the mews.”

Elise puffed out her cheeks. “Aww, seriously? I just wanna pet the birds.”

Camilla smiled fondly down at her. “Aren’t you cute?” When Elise huffed and puffed out her cheeks a little more, turning her cheeks a pinkish-red, Camilla patted her head. “Oh, sweetie, I understand. And if you like, I’ll take you to the dovecote, too; I’m sure the pigeons will love to see you. But the falcons are different. They might hurt you if you’re too rough with them, even with their jesses and their hoods on. You have to be more mindful.”

After a long moment, Elise nodded reluctantly. “Alright. So can we go see them, now?”

Oh, such enthusiasm. Camilla’s smile widened. “Yes, sweetie, we can go see them now.”

With all the fervor of a nine-year-old girl who was always happy to get away from court, Elise raised off towards the mews. With all the stillness of a twelve-year-old boy who was always trying to convince everyone around him that he was a mature adult, Leo stayed where he was, waiting for Camilla’s word.

“Oh, are you looking to escort me?” Like Elise’s brooch, Leo’s shirt collar was a little crooked. Camilla straightened it out, her smile widening further as Leo realized what she was doing and his face screwed up in embarrassment. Always so touchy about his appearance, her little brother. “What a gentleman you are.”

Color flooded into Leo’s pale cheeks, so fast and so red that Camilla could let her attention wander a little and imagine he really was bleeding. He looked away from her and muttered something Camilla couldn’t quite make out, but sounded like he thought the two of them should hurry, the better to keep Elise from burning the mews down while she was unsupervised.

Or something like that. Either way, Camilla got the gist.

“Come along, little brother. Elise won’t teach herself how to handle a falcon—though I’m sure she shall try, if allowed the opportunity.”

As it turned out, ‘unsupervised’ wasn’t quite the way to describe how Camilla and Leo found Elise. Camilla had earlier told the keeper of the mews what she intended, and Robert, dear man, had stuck around. When Camilla entered the mews, when the warm, still air of that place struck her, determined to make her regret the warm cloak that was necessary outside, she found Robert showing Elise around the mews, keeping a steadying hand on her shoulder to keep her from going too close to the falcons.

“And that there—“ he pointed to the large bird who undoubtedly ruled the roost, if the fierce gaze of her yellow eyes and the way she puffed her white-streaked silver feathers was any indication “—is Lady Camilla’s gyrfalcon. She’s a sight to behold on the hunt; I once saw her take down a red fox unaided.”

“Keep in mind, though,” and when Elise jumped a little at the sudden sounding of her sister’s voice, Camila graced her with a gentle smile, “that Polaris was _supposed_ to be going for the hare, and that her bout with the fox could have ended very differently if Polaris hadn’t been strong enough to break the fox’s neck so quickly.”

When her mother had been teaching her the very basics of falconry, she had warned her over and over again that a falcon was not a dog, nor even a cat. ‘Domesticated’ did not necessarily equate to ‘tamed,’ and her falcon, no matter how many she had over the course of her life or how long she had a particular one, would always be a wild animal at heart. It would never be a tame pet, responding to her every word with obedience. She would never have that level of control.

Camilla always kept that in mind when handling Polaris, knowing full well that she was big enough to inflict serious injury if she ever got it into her head to do so. But as regards to hunting… The incident with the fox had not been a pleasant one. It had not been a pleasant reminder.

Whatever disquiet the memory ignited within Camilla, it didn’t seem to be something that had the power to attract Elise’s notice. “That’s so cool!” she gushed, clapping a hand over her mouth, and practically bouncing with excitement. “Are you gonna teach me how to do that, Camilla?”

“Not today, dear. There’s a lot you need to learn before you’re ready to take your falcon hunting. And besides, your falcon has to become accustomed to you before you can work with it properly on the hunt. That’s going to take a while.”

Though Elise did not look overly enthused by this news, she nodded seriously. “It’s like with horses and ponies, isn’t it? You can’t just hop on a wild one and expect it to let you ride it right away.”

That was right—thought Elise still mostly rode her sturdy pony, Zara, she _was_ starting to learn how to ride a horse, as well. Whoever was teaching her had clearly been conscientious about more things than just riding. So much the better.

“And it’s just the same with falcons,” Camilla affirmed, flicking a stray lock of hair behind her shoulder. “If you don’t give them a reason to come back to you, they’ll just fly off when you take off their hood, even with their jesses still on. You must make yourself someone the falcon trusts, someone they can feel affection for.” Camilla was uncertain as to how much affection a falcon could muster for a human—less than a pony or a horse, certainly—but she did not think it overly wise to tell Elise as much. Elise would want to make _friends_ , after all.

Speaking of that, it was time to move on.

“Now, Elise, there are three birds here in the mews. It’s a good idea not to have too many falcons at once, or you won’t have enough time to give them all the exercise they need to stay in good health.”

Leo kept quiet—he had heard all of this before, and seemed content to let his more experienced sister take point—but Elise had a question, just out of the gates. “But Camilla, you’re at court or off on missions for Father a _lot_. What do the birds do when you’re not here?”

Camilla gestured to Robert, who told Elise, “When Lady Camilla ain’t here, I give the girls their exercise. They’re predators, Lady Elise; they’ve got hunting in their blood. You keep ‘em in here too long, and they’ll just wither away, like a flower kept in the dark.”

This time, Elise’s serious nod was not coupled with the same lack of enthusiasm Camilla had sensed earlier. “Yeah, like Rochford. He’ll get fat if I don’t take him out for walks.”

The situation wasn’t quite the same for a palfrey as for falcons, but at least she had the basic principle down. “Leo, why don’t you show Elise your merlin before we introduce her to hers? I know you’ve been dying to show her off.”

Leo didn’t exactly deny the “accusation,” though given the way hat red color returned so quickly to his face, the assent hadn’t been granted without some reservations. Camilla _knew_ he’d be happy to show off his merlin, though.

She’d been so worried, when she had first begun teaching him falconry, about the way her brother would react to being given what was generally regarded as a noble _woman’s_ hunting falcon. As far as Camilla was concerned, a merlin was far and away the best choice for a beginner, at least among the falcons native to this part of Nohr. But she knew many noblemen who would have taken being presented with a merlin as an insult to their manhood, and Leo couldn’t help but hear things at court…

As it turned out, Camilla’s fears had been baseless. Leo did not have a fondness for animals to match Elise or Corrin’s, but when he had first been presented with the bird Camilla had chosen for him, his eyes had, if only minutely, grown soft as they so rarely did anymore. Camilla couldn’t tell just how much he enjoyed hunting itself, but he had never complained about it, either.

Baseless then, and baseless now. “She’s over here,” Leo said to Elise, ushering her to another part of the mews, where a merlin with a white breast and dark brown plumage over her back and wings was waiting. “I’ve had Guinevere a little over a year—“

“Aww, you named her Guinevere? That’s such a cute name, Leo.”

“—and I’ve taken her hunting a few times since then,” Leo went on, managing to keep from missing too much of a beat. (One day, Camilla would have to figure out just what it was that made Leo name his merlin ‘Guinevere.’) “Merlins mostly hunt other birds; Guinevere’s shown a fondness for quail, when she can find it.”

Elise’s eyes went round. ‘So you must eat quail a lot when you’re here, huh?”

At that, Leo shook his head, grimacing a little. “We’re still training Guinevere not to savage her prey; it’s… taking some time.”

Camilla couldn’t quite resist the urge to roll her eyes (Though she did take care to make sure she wasn’t in Leo’s line of sight when she did so). She’d always had some trouble training her falcons (both Polaris, and Polaris’s predecessor) to leave their prey intact after killing it. It was a process, and one that could take quite a while. There was no telling Leo that, though. The first hunt he had taken Guinevere on that saw her catching her quarry, the sight of the savaged quail had been like he’d been hit by a carriage, he was so mortified. Camilla had hastened to assure him that this was completely normal and that Guinevere could be trained out of it, given time, but he’d slipped into a sullen silence that had metastasized into a quiet, self-flagellating sulk.

They actually had made some progress—if not with Guinevere, at least with Leo. Leo was halfway down the path to accepting that the fault did not actually lie with him. Camilla bit back a sigh. Her brothers, the only brothers she had left in this world, for all that others regarded them as being like night and day, they did have certain things in common.

Leo took his falconry gauntlet from his cloak pocket, exchanging it for the glove on his right hand. Carefully, gently, he coaxed Guinevere onto his hand, and here was where Leo excelled, for he was always able to project the sort of posture and body language that would set his merlin at her ease, and indeed, she looked just as content perched on his hand as she had in her roost. “You can pet her,” Leo murmured, “but you have to be gentle, and only pet her head. It’s very easy to hurt a merlin’s wings by accident if you aren’t careful.”

As Camilla watched Elise pet Guinevere under Leo’s watchful eye, she felt her throat constrict, her eyes start to prickle.

She had spent more time with her mother and her maternal sisters handling and hunting with the falcons than she had anywhere else. Or, perhaps, it was what she chose to remember as the most time she had spent with them. It had certainly been the source of the happiest memories she had of the three of them, away from the royal court and the constant infighting Camilla had endured there, pitted against her half-siblings and their mothers.

As to whether her mother had loved her and her sisters or not, that was a question Camilla didn’t think she would ever be able to answer, one way or the other. Likely, the most honest answer wound end up being something along the lines of ‘it’s complicated,’ and oh, Camilla had had _more_ than enough of having that be the only honest answer to questions in her life. For the most part, she simply tried not to think about it.

What she did know was that there had been a time when her mother poured more time into her and her older and younger sisters than what was necessary simply to use them as pawns to gain their father’s favor. Long gone, those times, but she remembered them still, and she remembered the care her mother had taken when she taught her first two daughters, and later little Daphne as well, how to handle their falcons (Lady Cecilia had had them learn with lanner falcons, but frankly, Camilla thought them too big to want to introduce Leo and Elise to falconry through them, and they’d suffered in Nohr’s cold, rainy climate, anyways). She remembered all the hours they had spent together in the mews, the four of them, the malignancies of the royal court seeming like nothing more than a bad dream.

“ _Well done, Camilla,”_ her mother had said to her the first time she led her lanner on a successful hunt. _“You show promise. All of you do.”_

If Camilla could have had a mother who was like that all of the time, things would have been… Well, her mother would likely have died sooner than she had, if she had been like that, all of the time. Lady Cecilia as she had actually been knew how to play the game. A mother who didn’t know how to use her children as game pieces would likely have been devoured by the court far sooner.

She couldn’t have this with her mother. She couldn’t have this with Beatrix and Daphne. Not ever again. The thing about moldering corpses was that they couldn’t give comfort to anyone.

She would be good enough for the children before her now. She would never use them as game pieces, nor suffer to see them used as game pieces by others. This moment would be something routine for Leo and Elise, not something to look back on years later as a dream of lost happiness. Camilla would make certain of it.


End file.
